


how sweet and strange

by wreathed



Category: British Comedy RPF, Just Puddings (Web Series), Off Menu with Ed Gamble and James Acaster (Podcast)
Genre: Awkward Romance, Eating, Flirting, Friends to Lovers, London, M/M, Pre-Slash, Restaurants
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-12-21 11:23:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21074099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreathed/pseuds/wreathed
Summary: A chance last-minute booking means Ed end up taking James to one of the most romantic restaurants in London.





	how sweet and strange

**Author's Note:**

  * For [suricatta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/suricatta/gifts).

> This one's [suricatta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/suricatta)'s premise: _either one of them finding a restaurant on the internet they want to try, inviting the other, and then them getting there and it is APPALLINGLY ROMANTIC _. Thank you for this excellent prompt.

Pleased to be distracted from trying and failing to work on a draft of some new material, James unlocks his phone to find multiple notifications flashing up at him. He opens the message from Ed first, which turns out to be some forwarded restaurant reservation details for an evening in a few days’ time.

_This Thursday??_ Ed has messaged, with two question marks. _Friend of a friend had a bad breakup and doesn’t want the booking anymore._

_It’s a date_, James responds, frowns at the message he’s just typed for a full thirty seconds, then gets the good sense to stick the details in his phone’s calendar.

*

Their waitress is immediately welcoming, attentive, and accommodating of Ed’s insistence they hang onto their coats; it’s as if they’re more important people than they actually are.

Inside, it’s warm, dark and opulent. James can smell the expensive perfume of somebody he doesn’t know coming from somewhere. A jazz pianist is playing at the other end of the room.

They are brought to a squashy red velvet wall banquette lit mostly by one shaded table lamp, and James’s heart give a concerned leap as he notices that the place settings are side by side and there’s no seat on the other side of the table.

“Cosy!” Ed murmurs to him cheerfully as they sit down next to each other. Then there’s the press of James’s thigh being right up against Ed’s, before James moves his leg away in a way more suddenly than he’d intended. He hopes Ed doesn’t notice.

She asks them if they want still or sparkling water, prompting a now-obligatory eyebrow raise from James to Ed while Ed decides. He opts for sparkling.

“We are honoured you have chosen to spend your five year anniversary with us,” the waitress chooses to end on, then promptly stalks off, not impolitely.

“We're not—”

“That's not—”

But she had already disappeared.

James takes a look at their surroundings. They’ve been seated at a table for two in a long row of tables of two. At each of those other tables are couples, actual proper romantic couples, who are all cosied up tight to each other. A few banquettes away, it looks like one woman has a hand very high up the thigh of the man sitting next to her. James looks away quickly.

“Did you tell them that?” James asks Ed tentatively, aware his voice sounds as if something scary has just jumped out at him from behind the sofa.

“Of course I didn’t! I’ll correct her next time she comes around. No need to completely and utterly freak out.”

“I’m not,” James protests, and Ed’s look of concern turns into one of scepticism. On occasion, James had noticed, Ed likes to joke to others that he and James _are_ a romantic couple, which presumably meant he thought the very idea of it was strange and inviable.

But the next time they see their waitress, she brings them a not-inexpensive bottle of Marsanne that they hadn’t ordered.

“On the house,” she smiles, and pours a small amount for tasting in James’s glass. That gives James the pleasant experience of feeling like like he’s beaten Ed at something, especially as Ed looks so annoyed that it’s not his opinion on the adequacy of the wine being sought. 

After tasting it – it’s very nice – James nods his assent to more being poured. Neither of them say a thing until the waitress leaves them alone once more.

“This tastes incredible,” Ed says, after inelegantly downing half a glass in one go. “What are your thoughts on going along with things for a couple of hours in exchange for free drinks?”

“What, that we’re a couple?” James says, lifting up his wineglass to take another sip and ignoring the tightness of his throat as he swallows. “I guess. I mean, _we_ know it’s not real.”

“I know you’re not so much of a wine person, mate. There might be more free stuff though, yeah?” Ed grins, conspiratorially elbowing James in the waist. “Like a free pudding?”

“Do you really think we’ll get a free pudding?” Nothing tasted better, James knew from previous experience, than a free pudding.

“Well,” Ed says. “It sort of is our ten year anniversary, right? We’ve known each other for ten years, now. So we’d deserve it. That’s twice as long as the people who originally booked were going to have been together, anyway. We’ll have to wait and see.”

Ed lifts up the stylishly designed menu from the table, and turns to James again. They’re very close, sitting like this, whenever they look at each other. “Have you looked at this already?”

“Nah,” James says, because he hasn’t had the chance to go on the restaurant’s website ahead of time. Or, at least, hadn’t the inclination.

“Great,” Ed replies breezily. “I know exactly what we’re going to have.”

James is happy to go along with that, he realises, the back of his neck only lightly prickling in the warm room. Ed knows what he likes.

They start with the dim sum selection, and they get some vension puffs as well, seeing as they were Lolly’s starter on her podcast episode. Nothing comes for them on the house this time, and James feels a slight pang of disappointment, even though he knows they don’t deserve anything.

Ed takes a photo of the venison puffs to send to Lolly, telling James off when he shifts against Ed so impatiently that he knocks Ed’s arm where he’s holding up his phone.

“Okay, you can eat one now,” Ed says once he’s finished taking the photo, and James feels his cheeks blush. Was he really so obvious? “Can’t even wait a second, can you?”

“Sorry,” James says quietly, the sound of his voice half-swallowed by the pleasant piano music, and reaches forward with his chopsticks. There’s a pleasant feeling in his head from the wine; he wonders how he will make himself feel if he holds himself back at every course until Ed tells him to start. It feels easy tonight to wait for Ed to make the decisions. Easy and comfortable and… friendly, definitely friendly.

James is famished, and Ed seems to be the same; when they’re eating, they’re too occupied to talk, and they only have the sound of the piano for company. James is delighted to find that everything tastes as good as it looks. Ed finishes just ahead of him, and James eats the last of his dim sum to the sound of Ed talking animatedly about the number of pleats in the dumpling dough, the flavour of the venison.

“What did you think?” Ed asks him as James clears his plate, and James, mouth still full, looks across to Ed and gives him an enthusiastic nod. He takes in Ed’s delighted expression for a moment, flushing once more at nothing but the closeness of the perfumed room and the clink of expensive cutlery, before looking back down at his empty plate.

Their waitress appears again to take their finished plates away, and then once more to bring their main course. Ed had ordered grilled sea bass for himself, with self-restraint that still feels incomprehensible to James, and had got James a luscious dish of stir fried wagyu. Their waitress had switched to being friendly but extremely efficient, and it didn’t feel like anything else for free was going to be forthcoming. 

Ed’s also ordered them pork dan dan noodles to share, so James starts fastidiously dividing the dish into two for transferring to their own plates. Ed watches him do it, apparently in thought, then wraps his hand around James’s right wrist.

“Maybe we should get a little closer, you know,” Ed is saying very quietly, and James’s heart thuds from the shocking, proprietary press of Ed’s fingers. “Look more comfortable with each other. Leave the noodles and we’ll share from the same plate. I’m not sure she’s buying it at the moment.”

“We couldn’t really get much closer without me getting my elbow in your main course,” James says irritably, feeling as if, somewhere, he’s taken a wrong turn on how to handle all of this. Improbably, Ed’s hand is still on his wrist, bare from the way he’s extended his reach beyond the cuff of his shirt, and James wonders if Ed can feel his pulse under his fingers.

“Bet you I can be better than you at making them believe we’re together,” Ed says, smirking basically against James’s ear, which is outrageous, James thinks. Ed keeps his hand where it is to forcibly move James’s hand away from the noodles, then picks up some with his own chopsticks and puts them onto James’s plate. Only then does he take his other hand off James’s wrist.

“I don’t know if this is a competition I want to be involved in,” James says, watching Ed’s face, but he can’t read anything unusual in it at all.

*

By the time they’ve finished their main courses, they’re both a few glasses of wine down – plus James had finished a cocktail Ed had ordered for him that he hadn’t caught the name of but tasted of spice, citrus and sugary cherries – and James is trying to work out whether or not he’s imagining the way Ed seems to be leaning closer towards him whenever he’s laughing at one of James’s jokes – which, James reflects with some pride, is often. There’s not enough room in these booths, he decides, for two grown men to sit side-by-side. He might have to go on TripAdvisor later and leave a review.

He’s just starting to forget that they’re surrounded by lots of other actual couples and is reflecting on what a good time he’s having when a woman in a long black dress holding a violin walks up to their table.

“Oh no,” James hears Ed murmur, and he can’t help but snort with awkward laughter.

“Many congratulations on your five year anniversary,” she says, addressing James directly – why not Ed, he wants to ask her, and after the wine tasting victory and all – and then begins to play something very romantic he’s heard before that he wants to say might be Tchaikovsky.

“Just keep smiling. Maybe at me? That might help,” Ed says, still very close to his ear. James sneaks a glance at Ed’s face, and he too looks seconds from barely-contained laughter. When James looks back around at the restaurant, everyone is watching at them, and one man is not-so-surreptitiously taking a video of them on his phone. James affects an unusually toothy grimace.

Eventually, the beautiful, unsuitable music stops, and they politely thank the violinist over the sound of the entire restaurant breaking into applause.

“That was awful,” Ed says, once the pianist has assumed and the chatter in the room has returned to normal. “We can hardly come clean now.”

“I wouldn't even do that for someone I _was_ trying to take home,” James says, making eye contact with the hem of the tablecloth.

“What, I can’t come round after?” Ed responds, sounding mock-hurt. “Man versus Food’s not going to watch itself, you know.”

Maybe there were too many couples in the restaurant after all, or maybe the heating is still turned up too much, because James feels all warm inside. He looks up at Ed, his head still tilted down, and smiles, genuinely this time, and Ed says “that's more like it; they’ll believe that” even though James hasn't done anything he wouldn’t normally do.

*

Ed decides he doesn’t want to fuck about with taking his level and so he orders himself a whiskey. For James, he chooses the apple cheesecake. “Two spoons, please,” he tells the waitress even though James knows he isn’t going to have any, tipping her an enormous and unnecessary wink, and James just about manages to suppress a long-suffering sigh.

“You’re not even going to eat any yourself,” James challenges Ed. “And they’re clearly not going to give us any more freebies.”

“You never know,” Ed responds, not particularly logically, because the evidence is clear. Perhaps it’s the wine talking.

Nothing feels more natural to James than sitting down for a good meal out with Ed, but it’s still an unusual feeling for him to be eating an extra course when the only other person present isn’t having anything. Not that James would dream of skipping dessert, of course, but it means that most of the time their meals end in Ed watching him eat, generally with some significant attention whilst ungainly swilling his spirit of choice around in the glass. Ed watching him eat dessert makes him feel weird.

It’s not that it makes him feel weird, James realises in his slightly tipsy brain as their waitress returns with the whiskey and the cheesecake. It’s that it makes him feel weird but he doesn’t want that feeling to stop.

Before he’s had a chance to pick up his spoon to eat this exquisite creation that’s just been placed in front of him – the cake has actually been made to look like a bright green cooking apple, which is undoubtedly impressive – Ed’s picked up the spoon closest to him and dug a great chunk out it.

“Wait!” James says, causing Ed to pause in his outrageous cheesecake strip mining and look at James like he’s fallen right into Ed’s hands. “You should have got your own if you were going to do that.”

“Oh,” Ed says, still looking very pleased with himself for some reason as he dips his spoon in some of the crumble surrounding the apple. “It’s not for me,” he says slyly, and lifts the sizable load of dessert he’s now gathered towards James’s mouth.

“People are looking,” James manages to finally say once his brain has momentarily stopped exploding. “I think everyone gets the idea, now. I’m sure they all believe we are genuinely romantically linked by now.”

“Go on,” Ed says, like this is something they do all the time. But Ed has never actually fed him food before, especially not in front of other people. Who, now they were not being serenaded by a violinist, were paying them no attention whatsoever, so who were they doing this for?

Hands held in fists against his trousers, a knot in the pit of his stomach, James closes his mouth around the spoon Ed is holding up to his mouth. He closes his eyes and hears the breath Ed exhales as he voices his approval. _God_ it’s good: vanilla-y and creamy but cut with the sharpness of the apple and tempered with added sugar.

“Good?” Ed asks about the pudding, and James gives a little shiver in the warm room from how close Ed’s voice is when he asks that before he swallows his first bite and says “_yeah_”.

When he finally opens his eyes, Ed is looking at him very intently, and James thinks _surely not, surely not_ and James sits there, looking back at Ed, his fists still tight against themselves and under the table.

“Well, I’d better not feed you the whole thing,” Ed says eventually, and James knocks the underside of the table in his haste to pick up his own spoon; he realises belatedly how long they’ve been sitting together like that. “As you say, they’ve got the idea.”

“I suppose,” James says, and eats the rest himself in too few mouthfuls, the whole time Ed watching and pressed right up against his side. James doesn’t have it in him now to move away.

“They’ve got cabaret downstairs,” Ed says once James has finished and they’re waiting for the bill, raising his eyebrows suggestively. “I’ve heard it gets quite, you know. Sexy, later on.”

“That sounds absolutely terrifying,” James says with some finality, and Ed does his face-about-to-burst-apart laugh again. “Where are you supposed to look? And what’s the appropriate facial expression to adopt? Appreciative of the artistry, I suppose, but _never_ like you’re perving.”

Ed looks, once again, absolutely delighted. “All right; I wasn’t really planning on us heading down there. I’m sure lots of the couples here will be going later, but that doesn’t mean it would be where I’d take you.”

“Well, okay,” James says carefully. “How _would_ you seduce me if you were actually trying to?”

“We’d go out somewhere to eat – like we just have, but without all the try-hard nonsense. Maybe somewhere that’s a little less of a pulsating crimson colour on the inside. Then I’d take you home for an extra dessert. I’d have some treat waiting for you from Dominique Ansel or something and feed it to you. Until I managed to get my leg over.”

“Well,” James says after a pause, clearing his throat. “Sounds like you’ve put some thought into that.”

“Never thought about it in my life,” Ed says, but his throat sounds all closed-off as he says it. “I’m extremely good at improvisation.”

“Want to come home with me?” James manages to blurt out to Ed at the precise moment their bill is brought to them, and he feels himself visibly cringe; their waitress slips away immediately, looking confused – presumably she had thought that was a done deal, since it was meant to be their five year anniversary and all. Ed, meanwhile, is giving James the intense look again. “Might have some chocolate digestives in.”

“You’ve been on tour,” Ed smiles. “As if you’ve got anything in your kitchen other than whatever’s left of that fancy caramel sauce that you haven’t already eaten straight from the jar.”

“It’s all gone. Bought a set of those dessert spoons with the long handles to get the last of it out.”

“What, you didn’t,” – Ed’s voice has gone all throaty – “just use your fingers?”

“_Ed_,” James says. He feels knocked for six, his heart thumping once again. To stop himself showing it, he fumbles for his wallet.

“What? There’s nothing inherently lascivious about me talking about your fingers,” Ed says innocently.

They split the bill – Ed tries to pay for it all at first, but James insists on fifty fifty – add on a generous tip, and leave straight away, their coats on hand for a swift getaway. Sometimes, James thinks, Ed is a genius. 

“Look,” James says once they were safely outside the restaurant and out into the cool night air, wrapped up tight in their coats and walking towards Berkeley Square. “Are you really coming back with me? Maybe it was something weird in the very expensive sparkling water in that place, but—”

“It’s not _the restaurant_, you idiot,” Ed says. “As good as the food and the wine was. I’ve wanted to get my leg over you for ages.”

“You’re always… sometimes you joke about it,” James mumbles. They stop in front of the square, unlit in the dark and canopied by the silhouettes of towering branches.

“Yeah,” Ed says simply, putting his hands on James’s waist. James feels like he’s been overcome by something grand and wonderful. “Because I’d wanted to see how you’d react. See if you were interested, too.”

“So, you want get your leg over and then you can finally do a runner?” James says defensively.

“No. I’d keep my leg over you. For a long time, probably.”

“You’d get cramp,” James says.

“Just run with the figure of speech, James,” Ed tells him, the grip of his hands tightening over James’s coat. “And the substance, yeah?”

James realises, when he’s standing there, that he wants to kiss Ed, and it’s something he wants very badly indeed. And Ed’s probably expecting him to. A large group of drunken office workers walk past them on the road opposite, their shouts amongst each other making James jump.

“Please let’s go home now,” James tells Ed quietly once the office workers have gone. Ed always has a plan, the idea for their next venture thought-out. James finds he has a desperate desire to know what Ed’s got planned for this new frontier, too.

Ed puts his mouth right up to James’s ear, then, and that alone feels so _good_: the warmth of his soft lips against his skin. “Can you be good and wait a little longer?” Ed asks, and James makes a helpless little noise that no-one but Ed, thank god, is going to hear. “Let’s get you back safe and warm inside. And then I’m going to kiss you until you’re begging me to not stop at kissing.”

“Sounds… sounds like an idea, yeah,” James replies, and they walk away from the trees together.

**Author's Note:**

> The restaurant: [Park Chinois](https://parkchinois.com/)  
The cocktail: [Vive Le Vent](https://parkchinois.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/PC_0.6_The-Bar-Cocktail-Menu_17072019-copy.pdf)  
The dessert: [Granny Smith Cheesecake](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DZORVsfWsAAOHNJ.jpg)


End file.
